Playing Games with the Law

Abstract

In the last two decades, the theory of games has increasingly dominated microeconomic theory. Frank Fisher recently asserted that game theory has become "the premier fashionable tool of microtheorists": That ascendancy appears fairly complete. Bright young theorists today tend to think of every problem in game-theoretic terms .... Every department feels it needs at least one game theorist or at least one theorist who thinks in game-theoretic terms.... The field appears to be in an exciting stage of ferment. Seminars, economic journals, and Ph.D. dissertations are awash with game-theoretic models of economic phenomena. The marginalist revolution of Samuelson is quickly being supplanted by the strategic models of a new breed of game theorists.